The Interaction of Architecture and Science

CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

To create beauty of form, and beauty of adaptation and connection,
in the land, or in the city: that is the core of every
architect’s work. And as all of us know, who have
tried to do it for years, it is fiendishly difficult to
do it well. It makes the utmost challenge to our
abilities, our artistic skills, our emotional resources.
Given how hard it is, and how precious it is when we
achieve it, even in small degree, many architects may
well ask themselves how anything scientific could
possibly help them in such a task. They could easily
wonder, “Is the interest in new science, and in a new
science of architecture, something trendy, a wish to be
“scientific” for its own sake, and little more?”

The answer is a resounding “No.” The purpose of a scientific view
of architecture is to enable us to create deeper
structure – and that means more satisfying design, more
eternal forms, more valuable places, more beautiful
buildings. The new theory is not merely a gloss on
architecture, to raise its intellectual level. It is
above all, a source of help – artistic help – to pull us
out of the mud pit we have fallen into during the last
eighty years, by making, following, and copying over
simplified forms, only because commercial instincts have
robbed the field entirely of the kind of awareness which
was needed, for millennia, by the people who made the
great buildings of the past, in many cultures, and in
many conditions.

This awareness hinges above all, on the processes that are used to
make these buildings. The process we have learned, and
have come to accept, as the “normal” way to design
buildings and to get them built – the procurement
methods of the 20th century – are very, very
defective. To do better, to make places people genuinely
like, to make places where people feel at home, it is
necessary to have new tools of practice – new ways of
creating buildings, new ways of conceiving buildings.
The science I speak of is the bearer of new, more
sophisticated techniques of making, shaping and
designing. It is something that opens our eyes, as
artists, and permits us to do thing we have not dreamed
of for decades or generations.

This Katarxis 3 issue describes, very simply, a potential
for a new beginning in architecture. I'm extremely
pleased that it includes a presentation and discussion
of my work over the last three decades. I have spent
most of my life trying to make scientific statements
about the character of the world which lay a foundation
of a new architecture. This case is made comprehensively in The Nature of Order. Because these statements
do indeed represent "a new paradigm," it is not going to
be easy for them to be absorbed by the scientific
community, though I think there is a reasonable chance
that it may succeed. For this reason, I have contributed
extensive discussions to this issue, and allowed many
pictures of my work to be presented, after what has been a long silence.

In the public world of architecture, after the overwhelming
reception to A Pattern Language, there has been
an almost 20-year long silence from me, with only small
snippets of information -- buildings, theory, etc. With
the appearance of The Nature of Order this
silence has been broken. I agreed to give Katarxis 3
the opportunity to be one place where the new statement
about me and my work was to be seen, unveiled if you
like. That is of course, a very considerable moment for
me, and for the more scientific and more human direction
in architecture I believe I represent.

Throughout my career I have pushed very hard -- virtually alone, it
has often seemed -- to put architecture onto a track
which is deeply involved with science, new or otherwise,
and is also concerned with a way of understanding value
as something real, not merely a matter of opinion.
Perhaps better put, though it is more or less the same
thing, I have pushed to put architecture onto a track
which is rooted in empirical reality – with attention to
what is real, and factual, about human beings,
buildings, and the way we feel, deeply or not, in the
buildings that are made, and the way that buildings
serve us. This has inevitably put me at odds with a
crippled architectural world-view that is unable to
conceive of common human value outside of "personal
preference."

Architecture and the New Science

I began in 1964, with Notes on the Synthesis of Form,
the first work that truly looked at architecture from a
scientist's point of view, yet moving towards the core
and meaning of architecture, not merely technics. (Of
course there had been many decades of technical science
in architecture, addressing problems of heat, materials,
lighting, etc. I am not talking about
that, but rather about a
vision which allows us to see architecture itself
– the deepest problems of architecture – in a scientific
way).

In the seventies, I published a series of books,
including A Pattern Language, which
I believe represented
the first really solid achievement linking the core of
architecture to the scientific way of thinking.

However I had begun to recognize even then that there
were serious deficiencies in the scientific way of
thinking as it then existed, and that science itself
would need to change, in order to meet the challenge of
the deep problems lying at the core of architecture.

I began work on The Nature of Order in the late
seventies. By 1980 the content of The Nature of Order
was very roughly sketched out in a one-volume first
version.

By 1983 I had begun to realize that this new way of
thinking required very serious changes in science, and
that architecture itself could make a contribution to
science, and not only receive a contribution from
science. In 1983 I wrote these words:

"In the past century, architecture has always been a
minor science if it has been a science at all. Present
day architects who want to be scientific, try to
incorporate the ideas of physics, psychology,
anthropology . . . in their work . . . in the hope of
keeping in tune with the "scientific" times. I believe
we are on the threshold of a new era, when this relation
between architecture and the physical sciences may be
reversed when the proper understanding of the deep
questions of space, as they are embodied in architecture
. . . will play a revolutionary role in the way we see
the world . . . and will do for the world view of the
21st and 22nd centuries, what physics did for the 19th
and 20th."

During the mid-eighties, the thing we now call "New Science",
comprising chaos theory, complexity and related concepts, began to
be discussed widely. Quite unexpectedly, my conviction
that architecture could provide input into science was
confirmed when computer scientists began to use the
Pattern Language in their work. This has now grown into
a full-fledged movement in computer science. One of its
recent manifestations is in the Jini pattern
language developed by Richard Gabriel and Ron Goldman of
Sun Microsystems.

Since the late eighties, Bill Hillier in London had been
looking at architectural problems with a scientific eye
– and very beautifully -- but there was some sense in
which his work with Julienne Hanson still bordered on
"technics". It did not quite visit real problems of
architectural form or the making of architecture as an
architect sees it.

In my view, the second person who began to explore the
deep connection between science and architecture was
Nikos Salingaros, one of the
four Katarxis editors. He had been working with
me helping me edit material in The Nature of Order,
for years, and at some point -- in the mid-nineties I
think -- began writing papers looking at architectural
problems in a scientific way. Then by the second half of
the nineties he began making important contributions to
the building of this bridge, and to scientific
explorations in architecture which constituted a bridge.

Brian Hanson, another editor,
has had a general tendency in this direction for a long
time, ever since I have known him. This emanates
originally from his interest in Ruskin, and his
conviction that
tangible, scientific means of understanding the world
(of the kind for which Ruskin longed) are at last coming
into being, capable also of guiding our actions within
it; and that these are capable of giving rise to
buildings and cities very different from those we
routinely construct today. This conviction, and his own
related efforts, are testified to by a beautiful
statement Brian made some months ago in a letter to The
Prince of Wales (the
basis for the afterword in this issue
of Katarxis 3), which solidly expresses the view
that the kind of science contemplated is larger than
opinion, and has the capacity to lead world architecture
out of the morass.

Senior Editor Lucien Steil's earliest work I
hardly know; but I know he was the one inspired to
create Katarxis 3, and that the idea of doing it
is what has brought us all together. That is a huge
thing, since it moves an initiative of immense
importance onto center stage and can, if we move
carefully and correctly, forever change the future of
architecture.

And Michael Mehaffy, my old student, is also inspired in
his writing. Both with Nikos and alone, I find his voice
as a writer compelling and fascinating.

All five of us are committed in one way or another, to
the vital importance of recognising that a true
architecture can in principle be dug, from the facts,
insights, and theories, that occur with a broadening of
science to include the human being. These include the
fundamental issue of adaptation as a primary concern in
architecture, as it has always been in biology and
ecology. Coupled with these views is a lateral
connection to modern views of complexity, and to new
scientific insights which come from extensions of
complexity theory, some of which have arisen within
architecture itself.

But it is important to note that my own insights did not derive
from complexity theory per se, since I began before the
current incarnation of complexity theory, and have had
much to say which covers a broader terrain -- possibly
one which is even more true than what the biologists and
ecologists have been able to create so far. Indeed, I
am very gratified to see that many concepts in the early
versions of The Nature of Order foreshadow ideas
that are only now coming into the "New Science". Nikos,
who worked with it for the last 20 years can vouch for
that -- indeed, he kept urging me to publish ever since
he read the first draft!

The recognition that all of these currents are flowing in this new
and hopeful direction -- this is what the five of us
all share.

I should perhaps end by drawing attention, once again, to building
form and built form, as the target of all our efforts.
Words are cheap. Building is hard. It is therefore vital
that readers of Katarxis 3 do not take with them
the impression that the topic of science and
architecture is merely about ideas, or merely about
words. It is – it must be – about buildings, and the
quality of public and private places, indoors and
outdoors, about the environment that we achieve.

For this reason, early on in this project, the editors asked me to
prepare a gallery of pictures of newly built works,
which would give readers some indication of the kind of
architecture, the kinds of buildings, and the quality of
buildings, which this new way of understanding
architecture, with a more scientific footing, would lead
to. It is, I think, in the quality of buildings that
people will be inspired, or not, to seek this new way of
thinking, and to decide that it is worthwhile, or not.

I invite you, therefore to look, from time to time, at the pictures
of new kinds of places, and new kinds of buildings.

Once you look at the pictures, and judge their
qualities, then I think you may read the many different
articles, essays, and exchanges in this magazine, by
many different writers, with an eye to working out, for
yourself, what kind of difference the topics raised in
these articles might make in our built world.